


the good things never last... they never.

by orphan_account



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Infidelity, M/M, Minor Character Death, So much angst, but its talked about a lot, liam barely shows up, niall was in the army
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:59:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3583761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is what he dreams at night: his home back in Jacobs street in Ireland with the green shutters, his mom yelling at him from the kitchen to stop tracking mud in the house and on her tile and her carpet, his father and the way he smokes Cuban Cigars out on their balcony every Christmas morning alone, his nephew Theo and how he smells like milk and innocence. It all comes to him in snippets and sections parts of a place he once knew and belonged but then he wakes up and he’s drenched in sweat and he doesn’t know why and he goes to the kitchen and opens another bottle of Jack Daniels and rips another part of himself into pieces. </p><p>or the one where Niall is one big tragic mess and Harry is the boy he meets on the fire escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the good things never last... they never.

**Author's Note:**

> title from swimming pool by the front bottoms

_“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”- Kurt Vonnegut_

This is what he dreams at night: his home back in Jacobs street in Ireland with the green shutters, his mom yelling at him from the kitchen to stop tracking mud in the house and on her tile and her carpet, his father and the way he smokes Cuban Cigars out on their balcony every Christmas morning alone, his nephew Theo and how he smells like milk and innocence. It all comes to him in snippets and sections parts of a place he once knew and belonged but then he wakes up and he’s drenched in sweat and he doesn’t know why and he goes to the kitchen and opens another bottle of Jack Daniels and rips another part of himself into pieces.

\--

War destroys him slowly and gradually. Niall wished it had been all at once so he’d been prepared for it so it could’ve been one awful experience but it happens like when you’re waiting for a fall, it’s like one day he has a folded up picture of his family and his life back home tucked somewhere safe and then the next he’s dropped and he doesn’t know who this skin belongs to and he doesn’t know whose blood it is and whose hands and who’s screaming like they’re being chopped apart. It happens slowly. But it’s neither here nor there.

\--

Rain drops remind him of bullets and he wakes up suffocating and drowning but instead of water its gasoline filling his lungs and someone lights a match and throws it and he burns.

\--

He’s been in his apartment in Chicago for a week flinching at every sound and working the courage to leave the place when his mother calls him and tells him she knows he’s back because Liam told her because of course he did. She says she wants him to come home and he presses himself into the mattress trying to become one with his bed sheets. He thinks that if he goes she’ll look at him one glance and she’ll see it that cracked part of him that runs straight down the middle. And he doesn’t want her to see him broken; he doesn’t even wanna see himself half the time. That’s the long and short of it.

\--

He lives up the street across from a Jewish Synagogue and every week he’ll pull his drapes outside and peek outside and there will be people gathering going inside to pray to their god. It jars Niall thinking that people still have faith because how can they when the world is set up just to ruin you? He jogs around his block or at least he tries to until his legs buckle from underneath him and he goes flying into a bicyclist almost cracking his head open… he disintegrates.

But again it’s neither here nor there.

\--

It goes like this: when he was younger he used to goof around a lot in his backyard with his best friend Sean. They pretended they’d shoot the bad guys and put them away and he and his best friend Sean had always wanted to be that you know? They were supposed to be warriors they were supposed to be gladiators but then Sean goes and he fucking drowns on Niall’s eighteenth birthday and the tragedy is Niall still sees him sometimes when he’s drunk, still eighteen, still fucking eighteen.

It continues like this: Niall goes to the army and he trains and he trains and he gets bigger and he thinks about Sean and how Sean would love it what they’re doing and at first it feels good because he’s becoming something you know? But then it becomes real and he comes crashing down to Earth. It isn’t a video game if you have actual blood on your hands anymore. It’s just scary.

He remembers it like this: he was standing at the airport and it was snowing up a storm out there, she smelled of flour and he smelled of pride. They called him son over and over again and she told him to come back to her face and he promised her goddamnit promised. And he doesn’t break his promises.

So he promised and it tasted like copper- like blood.

\--

This is how Ireland feels: like little league soccer teams, private school uniforms, hot summer days, Christmases, it feels like his parents being in love even for a little bit and it feels like him and his brother carving holes into the walls. He remembers one time Greg had shoved him off the roof when he was ten and he broke his arm and two front teeth and Greg had held his hand and cried the whole time to the ambulance. He was screaming: I didn’t mean to and Niall believed him and then gradually of course like all those before his arm healed and he got fake front teeth.

He still feels it sometimes the phantom crack in his arm because it’s been two whole weeks and when he closes his eyes it’s like he’s right there again and he can feel the gun hot and heavy in his hands and he can still hear the grenade and the way everything slips away from him.

His ears haven’t stopped ringing once.

The doctor says he might experience some hearing loss as he gets older.

It tastes sour.

\--

 “Ni,” his mom breathes when she sees him. She wraps her arms around him and she doesn’t smell like flour she doesn’t even smell recognizable aside from her Head and Shoulders. She repainted the whole house because she lives alone now, everything from the walls to the ceilings to the furniture is white all of it and Niall absolutely hates it. He glances over at her and she’s standing there watching him wary. He realizes then that he hasn’t said a word since he’s been there. He tries to open his mouth to get something anything out but it’s just silence and his heavy chest and he’s crumbling before her eyes.

He walks towards the kitchen his favorite place back when he used to live there back when things were okay and his best friend was alive. There is nothing cooking on the stove and it looks like something straight out of a home catalogue not a place that actual people actually use. He wants to ask her why she wanted him to come home if she took away his home but he’s hurting and he doesn’t want her to hurt too.

“Niall.” She says from behind him and he doesn’t even jump or flinch or anything. He’s seen too much to be scared of his mom sneaking up on him. But then he thinks about rain and how he can’t sleep through it. He turns so their facing each other and she’s looking at him with glassed over eyes like she might break down any second and he cocks his head and tries to say something reassuring but it’s gone and she sniffles and he has no clue how to fix it. How to fix anything.

She’s his mom but she isn’t all the same.

The thing is this: his mom never wore pantsuits back then; she was never the ponytail kind of mother. But now here he is and there she is and he’s living in a universe where people and things break away from him before he even gave them permission too.  

He walks up the carpeted stairs, walks down the white previously green hallways, and opens the door to his bedroom. It used to have predictable blue walls and all his trophies from things he used to do back when things are okay. And now it looks like a hotel room.

He starts screaming.

\--

This is how waking up from a nightmare feels like: your heart is having a party in your chest and your skin wants to crawl off right along with your bones. Your mouth tastes like smoke and everything smells like smoke and it’s so hot you begin to strip yourself of your layers and you hop into the shower. But you still feel it- the smoke.

\--

“It’s not my room. This isn’t my room.”

“You left.”

“I- mom,”

“You’re twenty four not fifteen. I had things to do and everybody left.”

“Mom.”

“I’m not going to keep this house like some kind of weird museum shrine, Niall Horan. I’m not.”

“Mom.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you. You left and your dad left and Greg left and everybody left. And you’re not okay.”

“I am.”

“Niall.”

“I’m okay.”

“Your hands haven’t stopped shaking once since you got here.”

\--

He can’t stay in the place with its white walls and its catalogue friendly kitchen so he tells his mom he’s just going to book a hotel for a week and figure out what he’s going to do with himself with his hands and the blood and the broken glass lodged in his skin. She tells him he should stay for dinner and Niall thinks (oh people use the kitchen?) but he politely declines anyway or as politely as someone can with blood trapped in his mouth dripping everywhere. He drives all the way to the lake where Sean died, nobody’s even there. Someone built a fence around it now. Niall wonders how many people had to die in it before someone realized that everything’s wrong.

\--

This is how it went: It was Niall’s eighteenth birthday and it was the perfect ending to the summer before Sean was supposed to off to some high class preppy school in Boston and before Niall was gonna go off to the community college and do something average and live an average life and marry an equally average girl. But Niall’d been toying around with Sean’s dog tag- the one his brother had given to him- taunting Sean with it and laughing and he doesn’t even remember what happened after that whether he was shoved or whether he stumbled but whatever it doesn’t matter now. All that matters is that he dropped it right into the lake and he felt himself combust.

“Oh my god.” He heard Sean say and he had turned around quickly. He looked at Niall and Niall looked at him.

“I’ll get it don’t worry.” Niall said even though he was shaking because swimming in that lake was strongly cautioned against because of all the people who had died in it from all the years past. But Sean had shaken his head,

“Nah, I’ll go get it.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah it’s mine.”

“I dropped it.”

“It’s okay I got it.”

Niall had shrugged.

He had shrugged.

\--

He texts Liam: can’t sleep.

Liam doesn’t text back. He rolls around in his bed it smells like nothing but detergent. He stares at the ceiling doesn’t have a single crack, he makes to scream but doesn’t. He thinks about the house he grew up on because it’s been reduced now to a house because no home looks like that. His stomach twists.

He needs a drink. The bar is closed, it closed at ten. It’s two in the morning. When he sleeps he’s always thinking too much about all these things that happened to him and left him alone and how he can never ever be normal again.

He wonders how Liam can be normal again, how he can go home to his wife with the big lips and their new baby and their fucking dog. How he can just stand there in the sun and he can soak it up and he can just and he can just and he can just.

So what if Niall malfunctions and forgets to eat and forgets to breathe and forgets lots of things. So what if the only thing he’s sure of is that he is very unsure. Of a lot of things of everything.

It’s like this: you give a boy a gun and he doesn’t kill the enemy. He kills himself.

\--

He wakes up and he showers and he texts Liam back. He leaves the room, he walks around the perimeter of the hotel, and it doesn’t hold much people. Ireland isn’t a very idea tourist place it’s just endless amounts of nothing. Niall makes do. He goes to the house he grew up in right up on Jacobs street with the falling apart garden and the falling apart woman and Niall wonders if this is what adulthood brings.

He thinks he should go back to Chicago.

He thinks he should lie in the snow. He makes up different scenarios about the afternoon with Sean. He wonders what would’ve happened if he would’ve jumped in instead, he wonders what would’ve happened if he had saved Sean in time.

\--

He goes back to Chicago two days after he comes to Ireland. He doesn’t even say goodbye to his mom he texts her while he’s on the plane that he might come home for a holiday that he’s long since stopped caring about. She texts back: _i worry about you._

When he lands on solid ground, he drops his phone on the asphalt, and stomps on it over and over again. He knows they are staring. He knows that he has absolutely and completely lost his goddamn fucking mind. And it feels so fucking good.

\--

He knows he needs to get a job.

Or something just to distract himself. But he lies in bed and he cries and he wallows and he’s just.

It’s been three weeks and he still feels the gun and he still hears Liam screaming and he still thinks about Sean and the white house on Jacobs street and.

His dad hasn’t seen him once.

Is his brother even in the country?

The realization that life falls apart is biting and it curls around his teeth into his molars and his wisdoms. He’s dying inside.

\--

He’s smoking cigarettes on the fire escape of his Chicago apartment he can see the lights twinkling every few seconds one goes off and the other goes on like some weird romantic game they’re playing with each other. It’s his fifth one and his throat is raw and he can feel his chest threatening to escape from him. No- not threatening- promising. He bites his tongue feels blood. Hears movement and turns around quickly. He lives alone. There is a boy on the fire escape with big eyes and long hair.

\--

This is how you make mistakes: you allow them to sleep in bed with you.

\--

He’s a boy not a man still has cheeks as soft as Theo’s thin blonde hair and he doesn’t have that cracked broken look that adults usually have. He has hands that could cover the whole Earth if he wanted them too. Niall’s still smoking his cigarette. Niall looks away. The boy doesn’t say a word, moves next to Niall leans on the fire escape. Its flimsy if they both jump on it hard enough and long enough it could break.

The idea is comforting.

He could ruin this if he really wanted to; the idea of playing god is comforting.

He doesn’t look at the boy in the face, he sees him from the corner of his eye, a blurb. Neither of them speak the boy doesn’t smoke or do drugs or drink or any of that. He just stands there. He smells like lilacs.

When the last cigarette burns him clean he decides it’s time to leave, doesn’t look at the boy as he escapes back into his apartment.

\--

His mom calls him the next day on the house phone, says, “I called your stepbrother.”

“My stepbrother?” Niall’s voice is scratched raw, his sheets smell of sweat.

“Louis. Maybe you forgot he existed.”

Niall doesn’t lie and say he didn’t. Sometimes he forgets about his dad and the life he lives when he isn’t being just Niall’s dad he’s being somebody else’s dad with a pretty woman named Johannah and all of her kids their fucking clan. Louis. His stepbrother.

Louis is laughter and cutting words and sly glances and the one person who Niall can smile around without feeling like he’s killed another person. The last time he saw Louis he was twenty three he was better. He didn’t think about Sean so often then. He didn’t have nightmares so often then.

“Why did you call him?”

“He’s coming to Chicago.”

Niall loses his breath.

“What?”

“Him and his new boyfriend Zayn or Zach something there is so much with that boy. He’s coming to Chicago.”

“I- did you call Louis to babysit me?”

He and his mother have never perfected the art of lying to each other.

“Yes.” She says and he laughs bitter and hollow and so so angry feels it crawling up inside of him. His stomach hurts like he’s allergic to people.

“I don’t need that, ma.”

“You’re not okay, Niall. You’re not. I saw you and I saw the look on your face and just… you need someone.”

“I have myself.”

If he even knew who that was anymore.

\--

It goes like this: he drives his Fiat to the airport where he finds Louis and a gorgeous boy waiting for him. Louis’ hair is different and he looks different sharper too like maybe things happened to him that Niall didn’t even know about. The boyfriend Zach or Zayn something has an arm draped around Louis’ shoulder and they’re intertwined like they need each other to breathe and looking at them hurts.

Everything hurts.

He walks towards them slowly and he doesn’t have to move further because Louis spots him and smiles.

“Brother!” He screams. It was their thing back when they were younger and they saw each other all the time. Louis hugs him, he’d love to say he hugged back, but it would be a lie. He stands there eyes wide open taking everything. Louis smells like coffee and cigarettes but he’s always smelled like that. He’s a doctor he’s always busy now.

“This is Zayn.” Louis says smiles at the boyfriend. Niall catches a glint on Louis’ hand, it’s a ring. A band right there on his hand. Niall glances up at him and Louis sees Niall see it. “My fiancé.” He adds for good measure. Niall shakes his head slowly stares Zayn in the eye. He’s gorgeous.

It’s a Shakespearean tragedy in the making.

\--

“This place is depressing.” Louis says drops his bags in the doorway. Niall watches him silently as he moves the way his hands touch the walls as if he is marking his territory, Zayn loiters in the living room and he glances at Niall every two seconds. Niall knows that Zayn is dangerous can see the way his honey eyes follow Niall as he moves to the kitchen to go make some tea, he knows Zayn is dangerous because he kisses Louis’ neck soft, and glances up at Niall hungry.

Niall was never that boy he will never be that boy he’s broken most of the time (all of the time) and it’s just maybe he craves the attention maybe he wants some semblance of control of the thought of someone being crazy enough to want him. He basks in it, shows Louis and Zayn their room, lays in bed. Thinks about the possibility. It worries him. He chokes back blood.

\--

He goes back to the fire escape. He has no cigarettes because he forgot to go down to the Quick Mart and get them but he has his lover Jack Daniels. He stands on the fire escape again stares down at the city and takes a swig every few seconds, his vision is fuzzy and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s tipsy or is it because he’s tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep.

The door slides open and he glances back. It’s the boy again with his doughy cheeks and his long curly hair like a girl’s. They stand next to each other quiet sans the honking of the taxis and the ant people going to their ant homes leading their ant lives.

“Beautiful isn’t it?” The boy says like this is a John Green formulaic novel in which one of them is in dire need of saving and the other is looking for their purpose. Doesn’t he know that you don’t need to fill every empty space with something because sometimes you ruin it? Niall says,

“What?”

“The city… isn’t it beautiful.”

It’s not. “It’s not.”

“It’s Chicago.” The boy says glances at him but Niall doesn’t turn his head. He’s still a blur out on the corner of his eye a blur that smells like lilacs and now weed. Maybe that’s why he’s particularly chatty tonight. High courage.

“It’s not pretty,” Niall says or was it beautiful the word the boy had used? “It’s awfully predictable.”

The boy hums at him vaguely and then doesn’t say a thing. They stand there and Niall takes another swig, it tastes like water now. His head rolls back. He’s tired and kind of drunk but its good being drunk is way better than being sober these days.

\--

When he sleeps he thinks of Sean and when he doesn’t sleep he thinks of the gun and the grenades and the ringing in his ears that hasn’t stopped once.

\--

The week goes like this: Louis forces them to go biking, talks about the wedding a lot talks about a lot of things a lot and it’s slowly become into gasoline, Niall sees Zayn see him. They’re dancing and Niall knows it and one is just waiting for the other one to misstep so they can overtake them. It’s cynical isn’t it? How the only thing sure about life is loss.

Niall goes back to the fire escape daily sometimes they talk and sometimes they don’t. The boy still smells like lilac fumes and weed and sometimes beer or whatever. He’s a beautiful blur because sometimes just sometimes Niall will look at him and see the curve of his face and the slope of his nose and the bow on the top of his lip and he’s that boy you know? The one that you lose. He’s the ‘one that got away’ type of boy.

Niall doesn’t want a YA novel. He just wants sex.

\--

He missteps the next week. Louis leaves to go grocery shopping because Niall has nothing but beer and microwavable pizzas. Zayn’s in the living room drawing because he’s an artist because of course he is. Niall drifts out of his bedroom barefoot and shirtless doesn’t know what he’s looking for but it’s something. He just had a paralyzing nightmare in which he couldn’t move and he’s shaking and his teeth are chattering and Zayn looks up.

He’s still dancing but Niall can hear the music in his head slowing down, they’re reaching the climax.

“Hey.” Zayn says to him doesn’t stop drawing.

“Hi,” Niall says then glances at his sketchpad, “what’re you drawing?”

“Just… things. Wanna see?”

“Yes.” Niall says. He sits next to Zayn breathes in Newport’s and hair gel and aftershave. Zayn’s drawing Louis and that is the tragedy of it all isn’t it? He’s drawing Louis. But then he looks at Niall slowly and softly he says,

“You’re quite gorgeous aren’t you?”

He blushes because gorgeous isn’t Niall. He breaks easy and he has skin like paper thin and he’s scar tissue and he’s gunning for an end. He laughs,

“I suppose.”

Zayn hums at him sets down the sketchpad leans back a little to relax. “I see the way you look at me.”

“Yeah?” Niall asks.

“Yeah.” Zayn says like a challenge and they’re both staring at each other. They’re still dancing and its Zayn dancing circles around him making him dizzy sometimes he’ll do a figure eight. “You gonna do anything about it?” Zayn asks him and then he gestures to his crotch. It isn’t subtle and it isn’t sexy the way Niall scrambles onto his knees begins unzipping Zayn’s pants; it isn’t sexy the way he swallows him whole. It’s just sad.

The burn in his throat is comforting and Zayn’s fingers are long and calming and it tangles in his hair hard. He needs it you know? The pain. Niall makes him come quick knows how to do it just right. Zayn doesn’t kiss him and Niall doesn’t want him to, would probably punch him in the throat if he ever tried he just pets Niall’s hair like Niall belongs to him. Niall feels better and disgusting afterwards all at the same time. Goes back to his room. Waits for Louis to come home. They’re kissing in the living room and Niall’s there but not really.

\--

They’re on the fire escape like they always are, Niall in his pajama bottoms and his flimsy t-shirt and his socks and the boy in his jumpers and his skinny jeans like he never sleeps. They stand there Niall chain smoking like he’s on a mission and the boy drinking a very predictable Heineken.

“My name is Harry.” He finally says. Niall doesn’t say anything because his stomach hurts because he didn’t want to know the boy’s name. He hates it when things become real because being real means being able to die or run away or leave or all the bullshit stuff that people do to other people. And Niall hates it.

“Didn’t ask.” He says gruff and mean. Harry is very unperturbed.

“Yeah but… feels weird you know, standing here with you and not knowing your name. Not knowing you.”

“There is nothing to know.”

He wants to say: _I keep seeing my dead best friend and my ears haven’t stopped ringing for two months._

But it feels heavy not something you slip into small talk.

And he doesn’t wanna tell Harry anyway. He doesn’t even wanna say it to himself. He doesn’t tell Harry his name but Harry tells him he looks cold. He insists he isn’t and he isn’t has long stopped feeling the difference between a cold bone chilling night and a hot one. He wakes up sweating all the time anyway. It might as well be summer in December.

Harry gives him his jacket. He holds it and doesn’t know what to do with it.

Harry says, “good night.”

Niall doesn’t say anything.

\--

The bad news: he loves the pain.

The good news: well… he woke up didn’t he?

\--

Zayn’s out one night and it’s just him and Louis. It’s weird it being just them back when they were younger and when the end of the world hadn’t happened it had always been Louis, Niall, and someone else right in the middle like Sean or Greg or Niall’s dad or Louis’ mom or something. But it’s just them. Louis is eating macaroni and cheese and watching The Wire because he has a sick obsession.

“I love him you know.” He says resting his head on Niall’s shoulder like they’re that kind of close. Maybe they are and Niall never realized it. Lots of things happen right under his nose that he never seems to notice. But the way Louis says it makes Niall blink makes Niall’s mouth taste like smoke again. It’s raw like when you wash your hands too much because you feel dirty or like when your boyfriend fucked you but then breaks up with you right the next day and you’re lying in your bed wondering where the hell you went wrong it’s raw. And Niall isn’t in the profession of breaking hearts.

“I know.” He says because he does because he sees Louis sometimes when even Zayn doesn’t see Louis the way he twists the ring around his finger. The wedding magazines he’s started buying. Niall doesn’t know what he’s doing he doesn’t know when he became the type of person to ruin people just for the sake of it. He doesn’t create tragedy he is the tragedy. He rips himself apart, he has blood gushing out of his mouth, and he’s dirty and broken.

\--

“It’s Niall.” He says because he needs to say it to someone. Because he forgets who he is when he looks in the mirror and he doesn’t even know who the hell he’s looking at. Half monster half victim. Harry looks at him raises an eyebrow,

“What?”

“My name.” Niall says and then rubs his eyes, takes a drag of the cigarette. He thinks he may be addicted. Harry’s still staring at him and Niall keeps thinking about his jacket about the contours of his face and the way he looks at Niall like all of this matters like sitting in a fire escape is real life like they don’t both of have tragedies like maybe this matters when they know it doesn’t. You don’t fall in love with a boy in a fire escape you kill a boy there.

“Niall.” Harry says testing it out on his lips.

“Yeah.” Niall says rubs his eyes again. That’s all he can give of himself then and maybe Harry senses it because he starts talking about himself.

“I’m twenty one.” He says and Niall thinks: aha he is a boy. “I study literature, I work at a supermarket. I have a turtle named Gary.” He smiles at Niall white teeth beautiful and blinding. Niall tries to smile back and it’s surprising real because even with Louis here with him nobody’s made him want to smile in a while. It’s refreshing… the need.

\--

He doesn’t stop. The thing with Zayn. Sometimes Louis’ words echo in his ears, “i love him,” but then the pain is good and Zayn is good to him and they don’t fuck because that’s a lot because Niall wouldn’t because Niall does something for him and Zayn gives him temporary calm. It works because then he doesn’t feel like he’s going crazy most of the time even when he knows he is.

\--

“I think you’re addicted,” is what Harry says to him the next time they meet on the fire escape. Niall is smoking a cigarette and Harry is nursing a bruise. Niall’s blood stops dripping in his mouth because he finally closes it. He stares.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Even though what he really wants to say is: you’re the best thing that’s happened to me in a while. Harry laughs and shrugs like it doesn’t mean anything,

“Got into it with one of my roommates.”

“Looks painful.”

“It is.” He spits out blood. Niall looks down at it; it goes from bright red to brown real quick. He looks back up at Harry. “But I’m fine.” Niall knows the part of the story really well. If this was a YA novel the protagonist would invite the love interest inside, they would nurse their bruises, and then maybe they’d talk about their lives. Maybe it would be the part where Niall tells Harry about Sean and Harry tells him some equally tragic thing but it’s not a YA novel it’s his life.

So he doesn’t invite Harry inside and Harry doesn’t ask to be invited inside and they continue living in this concrete bubble.

\--

Seeing each other in the real world where life actually happens is terrifying and crazy. Louis and Zayn wanted Starbucks and they both were hung over from partying the night before with some friends they had made in Chicago so they had begged Niall and Niall couldn’t stand looking at Zayn all draped over Louis and Louis digging himself into Zayn so Niall left made his way out. He didn’t even take his car considering the Starbucks was only a couple of blocks from his apartment building and maybe he needed some fresh air. He’d been trapped in the place for a while.

Starbucks has a line that files out to the sidewalk and Niall is impatient, taps his foot and looks around and clenches his jaw. He wants to bail and tell Louis some kind of lie but Louis would pout and make him feel guilty and he feels guilty enough to write a whole fucking book. He wonders if this is how Monica Lewinsky felt when she slept with Bill Clinton like she’d had a breakfast made of glass. He knew that he wasn’t the only one involved but when Louis found out (and it was a when not an if) Louis would stare at him like the bad guy because when you love someone you tended to love them even when they punched you in the face and spit on you repeatedly. It was human nature to be naïve.

Niall felt a tap on his shoulder pulling him from his reverie. He turned slowly and it was Harry standing there in bright daylight with long hair and a smile that could probably fill up all of Niall’s broken spaces. It may not have been a YA novel but Niall was in desperate need of saving.

“Hey.” Harry said still smiling. Niall smiled at him tight wondered if this was the part where he ran away but his feet didn’t move and there he was.

“Hi.” He said.

Harry was still smiling at him when he said, “you buying?”

It was a stupid question but Niall didn’t care. He didn’t. That was weird that Harry’s stupid questions humored him instead of bothered him. “Yeah. For my stepbrother and his fiancé.” His dirty cheating fiancé and me the dirty whore. Niall bit the inside of his lip to keep from spilling out on the sidewalk.

“Can they wait?”

“Dunno,” Niall said with a shrug, “why?”

“It just… it feels good you know?”

“What?” Niall asked.

“Knowing you’re real that you exist outside of the fire escape. I wanna buy you coffee… let me buy you coffee.”

Niall stared at him, his sincere face and his bruising cheekbone and the peeled off skin on his lip. He was quite pretty like something straight out of a dream. Niall didn’t even remember how dreams felt like not the nights when he woke up paralyzed and not the nights he woke up crying.

“Please.” Harry said when Niall didn’t answer. Niall sighed and then shrugged,

“Okay then. Buy me coffee.”

\--

Harry drives a nice vintage Mercedes Benz that he apparently likes to take boys he buys coffee for in. Niall feels dirty like he doesn’t belong in Harry’s car sipping coffee with him and watching him smile and laugh with that long neck of his. Niall keeps thinking maybe this is the part where he wakes up but he never does. He never does.

\--

You can’t be gay in the army. You’re either straight or you’re dead.

\--

“What’s your favorite author?” Niall tells him. They have their seats tipped back and they’re staring at the ceiling of Harry’s car, Niall’s curled on his side looking at Harry and Harry’s laying there smiling that dopey stupid smile of his. He makes Niall’s insides burn.

“I like… Junot Diaz.”

“Yeah?” Niall asks then says, “I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces.”

Harry turned and smiled at him more like beamed more like shone more like became the fucking sun, “wow… you know Junot Diaz?”

Niall blushed because he hated it the way Harry looked at him like he thought Niall was giving something like Niall could be something for him. Niall couldn’t even be something for himself. “I know a lot of things.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me something you know.”

“Okay,” Niall said, “the average person can hold their breath for three to four minutes… but it can take less than ten seconds for water to kill them.” Niall had read that after Sean had died when he had tried to make sense of everything and when he was just trying to understand how something like that could happen to someone like Sean. He’d read it and it hadn’t reassured him or anything he just kept having nightmares the ones where he was standing there staring down and the water was crystal and he could see Sean clawing or trying to claw to the surface but there was another Niall pulling him down every time he tried.

He was the murderer. He had killed him.

“Hey,” Harry said and Niall blinked then looked at him, “you alright?”

“I’m good. I’m fine.” Notatallnotatallnotatall.

\--

“I’ll be back I promise.” Sean said and Niall had stared at him and nodded slowly,

“Okay, I’ll be waiting here.” And then Niall had slid onto his stomach and Sean had smiled at him even though Niall could see it the tension around his eyes. Sean loved his brother and Niall couldn’t believe he’d dropped the dog tag. Niall had held his breath counted to ten and when there was no sign of Sean he’d peered into the water but it was murky with dirt.

Niall counted another five seconds and then he slipped into felt himself submerged in the water quick felt the way his heart was ricocheting off his ribcage as he searched for Sean the urgent way he kept trying to come up for breath but it was like an abyss and everything was dark. He couldn’t see Sean and that was when he knew something was terribly and horribly wrong like when you’re watching a scary movie and you know the murderer is there but the person about to get murdered doesn’t and then they hear a noise and they freeze and everybody in the theatre sighs in relief because they know.

\--

“You get lost a lot don’t you?” Harry asked him. They were at the fire escape both of them closer to each other this time, Niall still smoking and Harry reading some thick book that he hated. He was distracting himself by distracting Niall and Niall didn’t even know if that was good or bad. When he wasn’t distracted he was stuck thinking about everything he’d done wrong leading up to this point and when he was Harry was talking and smiling and making Niall want to give him half of his soul.

“Yeah. You learn a lot about yourself when you get lost inside of yourself.”

“Like what?” Harry asked him and Niall sighed then shrugged,

“Like you learn a lot about your mistakes and the things you’ve done correctly and you either love yourself or you hate yourself after it. You know?”

“Mhm,” Harry nodded, “and which category do you fall in? Do you love yourself?”

“I love getting lost.” It was a lie he hated it but he’d learned to tolerate it because it was the only thing he could do nowadays.

“Every time I see you you look like you’ve been to war.” Harry said after they’d been silence for a little bit. Niall dropped his cigarette and coughed up smoke.

“Don’t.” He snapped. Harry stared at him suddenly caught off guard by Niall’s sudden change but Niall didn’t care. Harry couldn’t just say something like that.

“Ni-,”

“Just don’t, okay? And my name is Niall.”

\--

This is how you know you’re falling in love with the boy with the green eyes and the complete lack of tact: even when you’re mad at him you wanna kiss him and even when you’re scared of what he might find out about you you wouldn’t mind giving it to him even if for a night, even if for the rest of your life.

\--

“I hurt you right?” Harry asked him soft two days after the war incident. Niall was drunk terribly so and sad so fucking sad like he was lost in it. But there was no way he could get out because he kept thinking of Sean and the way he landed on the concrete wall and he fell and he couldn’t get up afterwards for a long time how he bit his tongue so hard he almost ripped it off that’s what the doctor said how he has fractures on his spine. And he just kept thinking about everything because his best friend was dead and he was falling in love like a complete idiot.

“No.” Niall said because Harry hadn’t hurt him he had hurt him.

“I did something. I didn’t-,”

“I was in Afghanistan about uhm two months ago,” Niall licked his lips and Harry stopped talking. “A grenade went off a couple guys in my squadron died but I didn’t… I was uhm holding a gun to the head of an innocent woman who I’d been told could’ve been a threat. She wasn’t. If that grenade hadn’t gone off I would’ve shot her. She had a baby, he was three months old.”

Harry didn’t say a thing. Niall wondered if he was still breathing.

“And my best friend died on my eighteenth birthday so every single time September rolls around I kind of just miss him you know? I miss him a lot. It’s ridiculous you know because it’s been six years and you’d think it get better but it doesn’t… it just…. You learn how to breathe through the pain.”

“Oh, Niall.” Harry breathed out staring at him.

“And I’ve just wanted to kiss you for the longest time… since you gave me your sweater I just…”

“Do it.” Harry said quickly interrupting him. Niall turned his head. “Please kiss me because I’ve been scared and petrified that you’d push me away because I knew you were… sad and I just I didn’t wanna be that guy who tried so hard to get you to like me so please please just… kiss me.”

So he kissed him.

\--

This is what the boy feels like: when you were younger and sixteen you met a girl named Gabriella and she liked to play with your hair and she smelled of strawberries all the time. Sometimes you’d drive out to the very edge of town and you’d sit with her in the back seat of the car and you’d put on Fall Out Boy because she loved Fall Out Boy and sometimes you’d have sex but most of the time you guys just talked a lot. She loved to smoke cigarettes before cigarettes even became a fad. And she made you feel like you could be anything.

Kissing the boy feels like that like you just filled yourself up with a whole bunch of gasoline and if you tipped over you wouldn’t go crashing into a pile of lit matches.

\--

Niall woke up to screaming that wasn’t his. Loud broken screaming. He rolled off the bed quickly, his mouth tasted gross. He ran to Louis’ room where the screaming was coming from, Louis was throwing all of Zayn’s things out could see his sketch books and his clothes and everything being flung out the window. Niall gasped for air. There was the tragedy.

“Louis.” He hissed and Louis turned around saw him and just… broke. Fucking deflated like someone had just came and popped him all of a sudden and he collapsed onto the floor began to sob tears and snot mixing together. Niall was holding a gun and Louis was dying. “Louis.” He said again.

“Did you fuck him?” Louis asked through his thick angry dying sobs.

“No. I promise, Louis I didn’t I didn’t.” But Louis didn’t believe him and he knew he wouldn’t have even believed him. It took a special breed of people to do that to someone who cared about you.

“I’ll have my bags packed by tomorrow. I’ll leave by tomorrow.”

“Louis.”

“Don’t! Okay just don’t! You fucking fucked my fiancé or whatever and you think you can just come here with those eyes of yours and your heartbreak and you think I’ll just forgive you?” Louis was screaming loud. “We get it, Niall! You have a pretty shitty life but god get the hell over it! Stop with this bullshit nonsense its annoying and it doesn’t give you an excuse to sleep with people who don’t belong to you and justify it as you being broken! You’re just a bitch.”

\--

He remembers it like this: he found Sean eventually after he almost passed out with the dog tag in his hands and Niall couldn’t find a pulse and he’d done everything from mouth to mouth to the Heimlich it just… he was gone.

He remembers it like this: she was pleading for her life in a language Niall didn’t know- Niall thinks about that a lot, she probably sings to her baby in that language, she probably connects with her family in that language- and Niall was crying. There was a sudden explosion he went flying and he hit the wall, his temple started bleeding. He bit his lip so hard he almost ripped out half his tongue he remembered hearing screaming and it was when someone was loading him into a gurney that he realized it had been him.

\--

“What?”

“I fucked my step brother’s fiancé.”

Harry stared at him. “Why would you do that?”

Niall scoffed felt the bad taste in his mouth again, shrugged. “Because I’m a bad person?”

“No.”

“I just wanted to feel good you know and he was there and he was easy and I just… I felt good about myself. And I had you at night with me.”

“I love you know,” and Niall’s head snapped up quick stared at Harry’s traitor face and his traitor mouth, “it may not mean much to you but I love you.”

\--

This is how he remembers it: he doesn’t say it back.

_“Sorry about the blood in your mouth, I wish it was mine.”- Richard Siken._


End file.
